We finish the three-part series on mistakes newly promoted managers make. Part one can be found here. Part two can be found here. In order for your team members to better assess themselves, we can help – take a look at our Team & Individual Assessment service.

Pushing to be promoted before you’re ready

In their zeal to grow their careers, some managers apply to senior jobs too quickly in order to get ahead. All they prove is that they don’t yet have the judgement to know the growth they still need to make.

Jo was clearly a manager on the move. After receiving her engineering degree, she joined an engineering consulting firm. She had done a great job in her first two roles, taking on roles supporting mining projects seemingly effortlessly, earning some very senior attention in their firm. She was very pleased with her career so far and she had now been in her third role for about a year working as an analyst. She was eager to get ahead and had had a conversation with her boss that morning to let him know she would be ready very soon if an opportunity came along.

To her surprise, he looked at her and shook his head. “I’m on my way to a meeting this morning but let’s chat about this tomorrow morning.” They set a time and she went back to work feeling a little uneasy. He hadn’t looked pleased with her. She had thought she was doing the right thing, showing initiative, speaking up for herself and letting him know her commitment to growing her career. What would he have to say tomorrow?

The next morning, they met in his office, sitting at his visitor table. He asked her why she thought she was ready for that next role. She talked about her accomplishments and her ambitions and her commitment to her career.

He nodded and commented that everything she had said was very true. “You have been very committed to doing well and to making a good career. And we appreciate that about you,” he said. “And you take on every task we throw at you with enthusiasm and energy.” Then he asked her what she thought she needed to learn next.

What do you need to learn next?

This question threw her a bit but she rallied and talked about the technical challenges she saw in the next role that she hoped for.

He nodded but asked her if there was any other preparation she needed to do to be ready for it? She looked at him questioningly. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she asked.

He nodded again and then he told her that in all of her comments, she had missed speaking about seasoning and growing the mature judgment that she would need in the new role. “The last thing I want for you, Jo, is to be put into a role where this kind of judgment is needed and to see you fail. And if you take on the role too soon before you are ready, you could torpedo your career and make advancement much more difficult. You are at a critical spot in your career and it’s a spot where many fail. I want to see you succeed.”

He went on, “You have not been working on the most complicated projects yet and so you will need some experience with these. Promotion is always a judgement call and often there is a difference in perception between a candidate and those who would make the choice on promotion. While you might feel you are ready, I feel you would benefit from another year in your current role. And there are three things you can do to increase your chances.”

 Three things to know before a promotion

1. You need to become more of a team player. In the next role, there will be more staff management time and less technical time. To prove your ability to manage in a positive way, you need to be respected by your peers for us to have evidence that they will take your direction well. We need people to be intentional about how they are in their teams and take as much pleasure and excitement in the team being successful as they are about their own success.
2.   In your current role, you haven’t had some of the more complex and challenging assignments. You need to be involved in these to stretch you and allow you to develop your maturity and judgment. I will look for a project that you could become involved in, not as a replacement for your current role but in addition to it. This will help you prove that you are capable of complex reasoning as well as balancing competing work pressures.
3.   You need to work hard to help others succeed. For example, in all the conversation we’ve had today about your career, I haven’t heard anything about the team you are on and how you have helped them. If you were to move up, whom would you suggest replace you? Are they ready yet to move up? I believe that a person shouldn’t get promoted until they have grown a couple of possible candidates to take their place. Look for ways to help some more junior staff grow and demonstrate that management can have confidence in your ability to manage others’ careers, not just your own.

Her boss asked her to go away and to think about the conversation, then return the following week with a plan for how she could stretch and grow in the work she was doing. It turned out to be a pivotal conversation in her career. Years later, she would look back and see that it was at that point, that her real career growth had begun. She had embraced his advice and had bloomed where she had been planted. And she’d never forgotten the advice about being an intentional  team player. Every new level of peers had welcomed her when they experienced her willingness to enable their success as well as her own.

Big Tree Strategies is a consulting firm for senior executives in charge of teams managing large projects that are critical to their organization’s success. Sign up for our monthly newsletter. Take our 2 minute assessment to understand where your team is winning and where improvements are needed. Contact us for help with your teams running large capital projects.

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs”.
–Henry Ford

Goal Reset

Once a year, during a period that suits the company’s natural rhythm (for accounting firms, for example, nobody is focusing on anything other than client work from February to May) conduct a lessons learned and goal reset for the coming period. This activity may involve formal data gathering, inclusion of outside experts, restatement of vision and mission statements and other items fundamental to the organization’s positioning in the market place. This does not mean that they need to be reworked in their entirety – that depends on the judgement of the Executive and Board.

Action Planning

The bridge to strategic management is the regular updating of actions plans that support the strategic direction. This should not be signaled as extra work; instead it should be part of the management discipline of 30, 60, 90 day plans. Keeping planning to manageable chunks and checking on progress regularly allows for flexibility and small changes to direction.

Line of Sight to Personal Objectives

The continual and deliberate linkage of the action plans and personal objectives builds a sense of commitment to what the organization is attempting to do in the world.

One of the most effective examples we’ve seen was a vice president who created a small, professionally formatted work book for everyone in his organization. It was intended to give a direct connection between the goals, objective and metrics for the year and each employee’s personal objectives.

The booklet contained:

• Vision and Values of the organization (provided by the organization)
• Key Metrics for the year (provided by the organization)
• Goals and Objectives for the year (developed by the leadership team)
• Department Goals ( developed by the department)
• Team Goals (developed by the team leaders and their teams)
• Individual Team Member Goals (developed by the individual with input from the team leader and other team members)

Celebration & Accountability

Quarterly celebrations of success reinforce progress that is being made on the plan and communication of priorities on an ongoing basis. They also allow for reinforcement of accountability.

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime”.  Babe Ruth

 

A few years ago, we were approached by a large company, to help the internal-audit unit manager develop a strategic plan. We soon discovered why we had been asked to help. The manager was a dictator. He believed that it was his job to retreat to a quiet place (his office) and emerge several weeks later with a fully formed plan for his group to implement. The problem with his plan? It only contained his thinking, which wasn’t right, and as a result nobody really cared.

Strategic planning is a collaborative effort. Experts may be consulted and offer perspectives, but there is no substitute for those working in an organization, coming together to consider options and make plans. While final authority often rests with the Executive and Board, these groups seldom have the diversity, knowledge or understanding of customer needs to comprehensively plan for the future.

“Concertina planning”

The most successful approach to strategic planning that we have seen deliberately uses different groups of people at different times. Think of a concertina – the musical instrument – as a metaphor. When the concertina is squeezed the smallest group (management and/or the Board) takes care of their piece of the planning process – most often aspects that require in-camera discussions, confidential information and areas where authority is required

Where the concertina is expanded, more people are brought to the table for specific purposes – often to tap their knowledge, explore a diversity of opinions and insights, action planning or to keep them abreast of developments.

Strategic planning is seldom accomplished in less than two months. This starts from the time that initial meetings are held, through data gathering, forming judgements, making decisions and detailing action plans. During this time the concertina may be squeezed and released several times.

Three Critical Elements for ensuring a robust but living plan:

1. Robust Process – Plan the planning process carefully with a simple but effective build from one element to the next.
2. Engage the right people at the right time – Harness the power of people’s brains, experiences and diversity. In doing so, you guard against group think or dictatorship.
3. Let leaders lead – The planning approach suggested here is not democracy. Leaders must lead through the process – they must exercise clear thinking, courage and decisiveness.

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd”. Voltaire

Strategic planning seems to offer a contradictory set of possibilities. On the one hand planning promises clarity and certainty – use tools such as a SWOT analysis, market research and sound prioritization, goes the argument, and all will become clear. Once our direction is set, the job is to stay on plan.

“But wait a moment,” say those who want more flexibility.

“How can we be certain in a world of turmoil and change? We need to be agile and opportunistic. We need to be able to keep our options open. We need to keep thinking”.

Strategic planning should aim to provide both certainty and a healthy dose of doubt.

Either/Or vs Both/And

Barry Johnson in his book Polarity Management makes the point that too often complex problems are treated as if they ‘Either/Or’ problems. For example companies rush from centralizing control (the problem) to decentralizing it (the solution) in the hope that they will release creative energy nearer the customer. This may happen, but soon unintended consequences start showing themselves. Decentralization of decision making, for example, can lead to a loss of efficiency that is gained from coordination. And sooner or later, the pendulum starts creeping back.

From a planning and management perspective, we should avoid the simplistic ‘flavor of the month’ answer. Instead of relying on ‘Either/Or’ thinking, we should use ‘Both/And’ reasoning. ‘Both/And’ approaches require us to recognize the positives of both our options and search for ways to plan to benefit from those benefits. So, instead of swinging wildly from centralized to decentralized control, we should look for creative and innovative ways to get the best of both worlds – maintain central purchasing of key services and good, while delegating customer related decision making as close to the client as possible. It is possible to have the best of both centralized decision making and decentralized autonomy, but only if it deliberately planned for.

A Guide, not a Straitjacket

Strategic planning is only the first step in successful strategic management. A well-crafted strategic plan is the result of careful thinking that avoids, as far as possible, the traps of binary, Either/Or thinking. Once the strategic plan is complete, of course, it is potentially obsolete, overtaken by changes in the market place or the loss of a key account to a competitor. Strategic management needs to use the plan as a firm guide to the enterprise not as an inflexible straitjacket. Plans can seldom be “locked down”. More often they provide a playbook for a period of time and give management a guideline for activities and behaviours in the business.